I-Regulate: Charity regulators to sink their hooks into your mobile devices

Just two days before the death of innovator and entrepreneur Steve Jobs, state charity regulators were busy at their annual meeting trying to figure out how to get their non-innovative and job-killing regulatory grappling hooks into fundraising communications through social media.

The motto for charity regulators must be:  “Build it, and they will regulate it.”

Then again, these are the backwards-thinking regulators who pushed for adoption of the Protection of Charitable Assets Act, which takes regulation of charities back to the year 1535.  Yesterday I wrote at The Washington Examiner:

This year the [Uniform Law Commission] adopted a model state law called the Protection of Charitable Assets Act. The drafting committee proclaimed proudly that the new act was based on the English Statute of Uses from the year 1535, a concoction of King Henry VIII to increase his power over the realm a full two and a half centuries before the American Bill of Rights.

The ULC was informed of various constitutional objections, including that its model act would give state regulators unbridled, unilateral power to conduct searches of charities, religious organizations and ideologically leaning nonprofits.

These new powers came without rudimentary Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Henry VIII would have approved.

Charity regulators are stuck in a time warp.